


these four sides

by disappointed



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Character-centric, Gen, Instagram Influencer AU, Surrealism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-01-13 11:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18468415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disappointed/pseuds/disappointed
Summary: Yuta's life is made up of photos. He needs them to be perfect, and so he puts everything he has into them.





	these four sides

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [kpopolymfics2019](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/kpopolymfics2019) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
>  **Dean – "instagram"**  
> [lyrics](https://colorcodedlyrics.com/2017/12/dean-instagram) **|** [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKyMIrBClYw) **|** [supplementary](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b1/34/d2/b134d2689da4f8ed8da6158b9f224da4.jpg) \- [prompts](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/a7/38/8f/a7388f352e9a71030c6883c030c0713b.jpg)
> 
>  
> 
> this fic was written for K-Pop Olymfics 2019 as part of Team Alternate Universe 2. olymfics is a challenge in which participants write fics based on prompt sets and compete against other teams of writers, organized by genre. ~~competition winners are chosen by the readers, so please rate this fic using[this survey](https://forms.gle/x3KxbM2t8X2bHgQV8)!~~ update: polls have closed, thank you to everyone who voted!! my team won :')

The point of Yuta's life, really, is to spend time at places that are nice to look at. 

Today, he's spending a beautiful June Saturday afternoon in a restaurant he exhaustively researched to find and select. It's trendy enough; young and hip crowd, modern decor, chef who was just on a Food Network show. He’s here for the extremely Instagram-friendly photogenic food – this place plates perfectly – but he’s not paying attention to his meal in front of him. He’ll get around to it in a little while, when it’s time to photograph it. It’s been 27 hours since his last photo (him snuggling his sister's cat on his balcony surrounded by meticulously arranged plants he just got even though he doesn’t know yet if they’re outdoor plants: _A little love is all you need ♥ #MakeNewFriends #cat #plants #succulents_ , 7.2k likes, 78 comments), and it’s going to take him a while to post the next one. It’ll take him maybe twenty shots to get the perfect one, then time to edit the photo, pick the right filter, come up with the right caption and hashtags, and check everything for typos or mistakes or anything he missed before posting. But he has a bit of time; this is his plan for the afternoon, after all. It doesn’t matter if the food gets cold. He’s not here to eat it. He will, but he’s not here to. 

Right now, he’s reading the comments on yesterday morning’s cat-and-plants photo. Then he's checking Twitter to see the likes and retweets on his newest tweet and read some of his mentions. Then he's checking Snapchat for the number of views on his Snap story, and ending up back on Instagram again to do the same for his Insta story. Across the table, his photographer and assistant Taeyong is quietly eating his own meal. Taeyong’s used to this. He doesn’t mind; he’s sworn up and down that he doesn’t, and he shouldn’t. They’re friends, but this is also a job.

Yuta finally holds his phone over his plate. He ordered a sashimi tuna salad with wasabi avocado because he knew the vibrant pinks and greens would pop, and they do. He tries a few angles to see which is best, rising a little in his chair and slumping down, tilting his phone in multiple directions, turning to different sides. This one’s tricky. The lighting in the restaurant isn’t as Insta-friendly as the Yelp photos led him to believe. 

“Should I try from my side?” Taeyong offers. 

“Yeah,” Yuta says. Taeyong eyes the plate, turns it 90 degrees, then snaps a photo and hands Yuta his phone across the table. Yuta examines it, then nods. “Oh, that’s really good. Take another one like that, but better.” 

“Of course,” Taeyong replies, and takes a little longer on this shot. He AirDrops it to Yuta, who opens it and nods in satisfaction, then immediately begins to edit without seeing Taeyong’s pleased smile. The lighting settings are first – brightness, then brilliance, then contrast.

“What's a good tuna pun?” Yuta asks Taeyong, while he’s finishing up the colour saturation and hue fixes. 

"Um." Taeyong thinks. "Oppor-tuna-ty?"

“ _Always take the oppor-tuna-ty to eat healthy_. Brilliant," Yuta declares, typing out the caption.

“Perfect,” Taeyong agrees.

The hashtags don’t take too long. Yuta kind of thinks in hashtags. He can capture items and moments and vibes succinctly in a matter of seconds after how much time he’s spent in that frame of mind. When he posts the photo, he can finally relax. He was coming up on 27 and a half hours without a new photo, and that’s fine, really, but it makes him a little anxious. 

“Eat your lunch now?” Taeyong suggests, in that tone of voice he uses when he’s mothering someone. 

“Right,” Yuta says, after a missed beat. He’s spent the past half hour staring at a picture of his meal and writing about it and somehow completely forgot he had it right in front of him. Slowly, he reaches for his fork.

“Lunch was good,” Taeyong comments when they’re leaving.

“Yeah,” Yuta says. He didn’t really notice. The likes and comments on his photo began coming in instantly, like they always do, and he’s easily distracted by people paying attention to him. Between his obsessive refreshes, he lost the focus necessary to taste. He looks at the photo again – it turned out beautiful. “Really good.”

  
  
  


On Monday, Yuta wakes up on a beach.

He knows where this is. Bali; March 12th 2019, 11:38 AM; 10.4k likes, 102 comments; _Morning in paradise :) #HeavenOnEarth #Bali #beach #vacation #sponsored_.

There are majestic palm trees arching behind him with their heavy fronds hanging down, a vibrant azure sky, gorgeous late morning sun. Smooth sand, barely the slightest wisps of clouds. The very picture of tropical beauty. 

But it's wrong. There's no wind in his hair, no smell of salt in the air, no squish of sand between his toes, no warmth of the sun on his skin. No rustling of the palm trees, calls of the birds, drifting of the clouds. No movement. No sound. No sensation. There's no life, no vitality. It's like a set of cardboard props. 

Funny, really. Props _was_ all they were. 

It's a square. A perfect square. Beyond the edges of it, it goes dark. No long stretch of the beach on either side of him, no shimmering expanse of the ocean in front of him, no atmosphere above the top of the clouds and the limited width of the ceiling of blue sky. No stretch of lusciously green grass behind him. He's trapped, stranded, alone in the square. The perfect square. 

Funny, really. That was how he saw it then. What was inside the square was the only thing that mattered.

Yuta can't step beyond the edge. He tries. There's no forcefield, no cliff to step off, nothing blocking his way, but he just _can't_. He runs at it, tries to jump past it, pushes at it, but he can't. His feet stop, his arms don't reach out all the way, his hands don't connect with anything at all. He can't get out. He's trapped. He runs from one side of the square to the other, the front to the back, and it's the same each time. It's the same. He can't get out of the square. He can't get out of the scene. Can't get out of Bali; April 12th, 11:38 AM; 10.4k likes, 102 comments.

He collapses shaking and terrified on the sand, the flat and temperate sand, and looks up at the dull sun in the sky. His eyes don't hurt.

  
  
  


Yuta spends an inordinate amount of time planning out photos. The concept, the mood, the location, the staging, the story he wants to convey. He has a notebook of ideas, nearly filled up with scrawls and sketches, like countless others before it. Some are planned for the upcoming few days to a week, and some are for further down the road when he has an opportune moment or lack of inspiration. Instagram influencers are _spontaneous_ , people assume. They go about their day living genuine lives, snapping candid shots as they go and perhaps putting a filter on them before typing out the first thought on the top of their head as a caption and hitting _post_ without meticulously picking through for errors. People make a lot of assumptions. Yuta’s livelihood relies on that. 

He’s been planning photos all morning. He’s been in a strange but creative place after his bizarre dream about Bali, and by now it’s been 26 hours since his last photo (him bare-faced in bed with a mug of tea in the sunlight streaming through his bedroom window: _Rise and shine! #SeizeTheDay #MakeTodayBeautiful #EveryDayCounts #morning #tea #sunshine #livegenuine_ ; 6.8k likes, 70 comments), and it’s about time for another. He needs to clean up a bit past his earlier stumble to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face and blunder through his elaborate skincare routine with his eyes sleepily shut. He needs makeup. He flips on the light in the bathroom this time, and looks at himself in the mirror. 

He gasps in horror. 

It’s the lighting. It has to be. Yuta turns the light off and disappears, then turns it back on and doesn’t reappear enough. He runs his hands all over his body frantically, desperately grasping to feel something solid, and is relieved and confused when everything he touches is. His head, his arms, his torso, his legs, everything is fully there. They all feel just as they should. But he can’t _see_ them fully. They’re a little faded, a little fainter, a little less of a concrete form.

The mirror must be dirty. There must be smudges preventing his image from fully reaching the mirror. Yuta grabs his towel and scrubs at it desperately, but nothing changes. Nothing appears any more. If the mirror’s not dirty, the lightbulb has to be dimming. He dashes out of the bathroom, feet scrambling on the wood floor, and grabs one of his ring lights from the corner of his bedroom. He runs back and sets it down in the first place he can and turns it on, but it makes no difference.

He’s not there enough. He’s _here_ , but he’s not _there_. It gets in his head, and makes him wonder if he really is _here_. 

It’s like a layer of him is missing. Like somehow, part of his surface has peeled off and he doesn’t know where it is. Like a bit of him was left somewhere, and he doesn’t know where. Because he’s not _here_ like he should be. Not enough.

Yuta doesn’t know where the rest of him is. 

“Do I look … normal?” Yuta finally can’t keep from asking Taeyong, twenty-five minutes after Taeyong arrives and gets him settled in the chair at his vanity; Taeyong does his makeup sometimes, and Yuta asked him to do it today. He doesn’t want to look in the mirror. He knows he should try to sound less suspicious, with the way Taeyong is already concerned because of how _off_ Yuta’s seemed since he got here. He wanted to tell Taeyong not to come over today because he feels like everything is wrong and he needs to process what happened, maybe try to figure something out, he doesn't know what, but he _needed_ Taeyong to. He really didn’t want to be alone, and thinking any more would drive him crazy, so he figured the best thing to do was to go about his usual life and maybe whatever is going on would wear off. He took a Xanax and didn’t look in the mirror again. 

Taeyong looks into his eyes, lowering the eyebrow pencil he’s using to shade in a small sparse spot where Yuta overplucked his left brow yesterday and then smudged the first round of pencil off. “What? I think so …” he says, then eyes the makeup scrutinisingly. “I don’t think I’m making you look weird.” 

“No, I mean … do _I_ look the same as yesterday?” Yuta clarifies. 

“Mostly …?” Taeyong replies, and it’s clear from the puzzled note in his voice he doesn’t really know what Yuta is asking. “Your eyeliner shape is a bit different and I contoured a little differently, so your face doesn’t look exactly the same.” 

“No, I …” Yuta shakes his head, trying not to sound frustrated because Taeyong just isn’t getting it. “ _Me_. There’s nothing wrong, or off, or …?”

“No.” Taeyong looks confused and concerned. “Like what?” 

“Just anything, that’s, I don’t know …” Yuta grapples for the words, with the way the Xanax has him a little bit foggy-headed and he doesn’t even know how to describe the problem anyway. “Strange? Or … maybe not as there, or …”

“Are you alright?” Taeyong looks genuinely worried now. He puts the pencil down on the counter of the vanity and presses the back of his hand to Yuta’s forehead, carefully studying his eyes. “Are you sick?” 

“No.” Yuta doesn’t like the worry, but it’s an overwhelming relief every time he feels Taeyong’s hands or one of the makeup application tools touch something solid. “Sorry. I guess I’m just tired. I’m sure the makeup looks good.” 

“Okay. If you don’t like it, we won’t do it this way again,” Taeyong says, then pauses. He’s looking at Yuta like he doesn’t really believe him. After a moment, he picks up the pencil again. After he finishes the touch-up, he reaches for the setting spray but doesn’t uncap it yet. “Why don’t you take a look at it and tell me if you want me to change anything before I set it?” he asks, indicating the mirror. 

Yuta feels cold. “I’ll see it in the photo,” he says, and gets up abruptly. 

He wonders if he’ll be in the photo again.

  
  
  


On Tuesday, Yuta wakes up on a dance floor. 

He knows where this is. Atmosphère Nightclub; November 28th 2018, 2:43 AM; 9.3k likes, 95 comments; _Dance like nobody's watching even though everybody is ;) #AtmosphereNightclub #LiveYourFreestLife_.

It's crowded, multicoloured strobe lights cutting through the darkness and smoke in the air. Everyone is packed in together dressed to the nines, short dresses and high heels and big watches and tight trousers, striving to be seen. Drinks are everywhere, colourful mixes in clear glasses.

But it's wrong. There's no flicker in the strobe lights, no swirling in the smoke, no music in the air, no thumping bass under his feet. No heat in the crowd, no movement in the bodies packed in around him. No sound of laughter. No smell of sweat, perfume, cologne and alcohol. No activity. No dimension. No depth. There's no energy, no vibrancy. It's like something constructed out of building blocks.

Funny, really. Back then when he was posing on the dance floor for Taeyong, those things were driving him crazy; they were distractions, interferences, intrusions into the photo he was trying to get. 

It's a square again. The edges are dark outside the frame, shadows abruptly rising up in the middle of the dance floor and over his head. No long bar with busy bartenders mixing up a nonstop stream of drink orders over to the left, no DJ booth elevated above the stage behind him, no stairs back up to his place in the VIP area to the right. With the way a few people are half out of the scene, only half of their bodies are there; the other half simply aren't. It's eerie. He shudders.

Funny, really. He would've been happy for none of those people to be there; their whole bodies might as well have been gone for all he cared. But half of them is just disturbing.

Yuta needs to get out. He can't be here in the empty version of this packed club, not with the mid-shine strobe lights and frozen smoke and half-people around him. He tries the edges of the box again, tries stepping past those edges and shoving on them and jumping through them, but there's nothing. He never makes contact with anything or gets past it. He can't get to wherever the rest of those people are. If they're anywhere at all.

He got out last time, he remembers. He woke up at his kitchen table with his eyes open and could've sworn he wasn't asleep. 

He waves his hand through a tendril of smoke, and the smoke doesn't move or give; his hand simply continues on its trajectory. He puts himself down on the polished dance floor, draws his knees up to his chest, looks back up at the smoke and waits.

  
  
  


Another thing Yuta spends a lot of time doing is moodboarding. He has a lot of digital moodboards, but he prefers physical moodboarding much more. He’s working on three at the moment, part of a related set: _For When You Feel Happy_ , _For When You Feel Sad_ and _For When You Feel Neutral_. He’s in that surreal and creative place again after his most recent bizarre dream (it had to be a dream, it didn’t feel like one but it had to be), so he went straight to his in-progress pieces from bed in a burst of inspiration and has been working tirelessly on them ever since. But finally it’s been 20 hours since his last photo (him walking down a city street in a sharp outfit and Taeyong's gorgeous makeup: _You've got it, so flaunt it :) #LiveConfidently #city #menswear #style_ ; 7.9k likes, 75 comments) and he has to drag himself away to get cleaned up and take a new one. 

He looks in the mirror cautiously, nervously, hoping whatever strange hallucination he was experiencing has worn off now.

But.

He’s more faded than before. His breath catches. He runs his hands frantically over himself again, pawing at his skin and hair and limbs desperately, and they all feel equally solid, but he’s much less corporeal in the mirror than he concretely feels. Less corporeal than yesterday. He drags his nails down his arms and struggles to breathe, concentrating on the way his chest tightens until air stretches his lungs. He closes his eyes and opens them again, turns the lights off and on, scrubs at the mirror with a towel, gets closer and then further from it, walks out of the side of it and then back in. He has to be imagining this. This can’t be real, because this can’t happen. A human can’t just _fade_ from a reflection. 

But yet.

Yuta runs to his bedroom and looks in the big stand mirror there, and finds himself faded as well. He runs into his kitchen and looks in the small square mirror on the wall over the table, and finds the same thing. This can’t be right. He must be having a problem with his vision – nothing else looks wrong, but that must be what it is. He can’t be somehow not _there_.

He looks like he’s missing another layer. 

Yuta grabbed his phone during his frantic dash through his bedroom, because it always makes its way back into his hand. In panic, he opens the front facing camera and snaps a photo of himself.

It’s normal. He’s solid. He’s vibrant. He’s all _there_. 

It’s a bizarre feeling of overwhelming relief, the way he feels when he takes an endless series of selfies and looks at them all. He looks so _real_. He takes shot after shot until he loses count. He keeps his eyes fixed on his own face in the camera, the face that’s so much more material than in the mirrors. He forgets to consider keeping track of how much time passes while he stands there in the middle of his kitchen capturing a constant stream of nearly identical images of his frozen smile. 

Even when he scrolls back through the photos once he finally manages to force himself to stop taking them, the underlying terror is still there. He takes a Xanax. It’s been too long now since his last photo, and he can’t think of anything else, so he digs through the collection of selfies he’s just taken – four hundred, it turns out – to pick out a good one, edit it, type a caption and a few hashtags he doesn’t fully process and then post. It's the first time since he first started out that he hasn't put a single bit of thought into whatever he's written. 

Immediately, the likes and comments start rolling in and remind him he exists.

  
  
  


On Wednesday, Yuta wakes up on a rooftop.

He knows where this is. Morning Glory; April 12th 2019, 12:31 PM; 9.1k likes, 90 comments; _Spring mornings are for good food in the sun ❀ #brunch #food_.

It’s a cute restaurant, one that’s just straddling the line between charmingly hipster and cliche. There are rustic wood tables, mason jars for cups, low-backed seats, narrow and crowded aisles between tables. The sun is shining and there’s a panoramic view of the city in the background, a few big lazy clouds in the sky. In front of him there's a plate of french toast covered in blackberry compote and powdered sugar.

But it’s wrong. There’s no chatter of the patrons, no clinking of silverware, no laughter of the people at the table with him. No warm spring air surrounding him, gentle breeze ruffling his hair, sun against his skin. No light glinting off the skyscrapers behind him, no hustle and bustle in the city. No smell of eggs and sausages and pastries, no taste of mimosa in his mouth. 

Funny, really. He wanted the photo to look like it was cut directly from a magazine. It feels like a magazine clipping now. 

The square stops, like it always does. There’s nothing beyond it, like there never is. No group of girls celebrating a birthday at the table beside them, no waiter in the middle of dropping a plate of breakfast hash across the roof, no small garden on the other side of it. None of the friends seated on either side of him and across the table from him, surrounding him just outside of the frame. 

Funny, really. They weren’t _friends_ , per se. They were _influencer friends_ , which is something different. They were extra figures and dynamic movement in his Instagram story, some more photos and profiles to be tagged in, more guaranteed popular comments, more likes. More cross-audience engagement. A bigger reach. An influx of new followers. People who understood the staged nature of the whole event but wouldn’t talk about it.

Yuta's not sure if there's a point to trying the edges of the square again. He eyes them for a while, deliberating, until the building feeling of claustrophobia gets too strong and he finds himself leaping out of his chair and trying to violently shove them anywhere they'll go. His hands don't make contact with anything. 

He got out the last two times, he remembers. He woke up (if that's what it was, the way he returned to the world). He sits back down in his chair, curled in on himself, and reaches for the mason jar of mimosa beside the plate of french toast. His hand moves through it without actually passing through it, and he's stuck holding nothing at all.

  
  
  


Yuta also spends a lot of time matching clothes together.

Right now he’s laying sprawled on his bed waiting for Taeyong to finish packing; Taeyong’s in his walk-in closet, carefully putting the looks Yuta’s assembled out of his latest shipment of sponsored clothes into garment bags to take on the road. Today’s one of their road trips, the days they go around the city photographing him in different locations in different outfits and stockpile them so he can post one of them whenever he needs an outfit photo. This shipment will last him 7 days of photos, which he’ll spread out over a few weeks; he doesn’t like posting the same sponsor too often in a short frame of time. The sponsors don’t like that either. It doesn’t look “organic” or “authentic”. He has a long-running partnership with this sponsor, posts #sponsored photos for them all the time, and they’re still into looking “organic” and “authentic”. His ability to make these business deals “organic” and “authentic” is why they like him. 

He likes the looks he put together today; he went with a bunch of different styles, but stuck on-brand. Exciting and fresh, but exactly what people would expect to see from him. New, but the same old thing. The perfect intersection of styling and branding is a much trickier place to get to than it sounds. 

“I like this,” Taeyong says, a bit muffled from inside his closet. A garment bag crinkles. “The long cardigan with the blue striped shirt and cropped pants. It’s going to look really good on you.” 

“You think so?” Yuta asks, raising his head a bit and trying not to sound too needy. “I wasn’t sure about that one. If it would make me look too short.” 

“No, the cardigan will lengthen you,” Taeyong reassures him. “You always look good, no matter what.” 

Yuta puts his head back down and raises his phone again. He opens Instagram out of reflex and begins to scroll his feed. The first few photos are all vacation pictures from different people plus one of some guy he doesn't remember following trying really hard to look like a hotshot, and he loses interest within a few seconds but continues scrolling anyway. Eventually he switches over to Twitter to check the likes and retweets on his latest tweet and read a few mentions. They make him feel a little more grounded, a little less adrift; he’s been feeling a little adrift lately. Eventually he ends up on his own Instagram, because he always ends up there. He scrolls through his photos slowly at first, then a little more frantically, watching the pictures of himself go by: city landmarks, cocktail lounges, sponsored events, his continuously redecorated kitchen. He can’t help but imagine himself back in each one, within the frame. For one brief and crazy moment, he finds himself wondering what would happen if he never took another picture again. 

“I like this one too,” Taeyong says. “The blue sweater and the cuffed jeans. Did you try it on yet?” 

“No,” Yuta replies. He’s been avoiding the mirror today. He’s one of those people that looks in every single mirror he passes, for a little too long, but that was before. Now, he doesn’t want to see what will be in it, or what won’t. If there might be one less layer. Taeyong has said nothing about the fact that Yuta asked him to do his makeup again today and didn’t check it when he was done, just immediately got up with a quick _I trust you_. He’s only used his front facing camera as a mirror today, and even that he’s been trying to minimise when it’s not necessary rather than just staring at himself when he gets bored like he usually does, afraid of whether it might start fading too. He’s getting used to it a little more, fading, with the way he’s convincing himself it’s a stress-related trick of the mind and it’ll wear off; he still fully appears in photos, so it can’t be real. He took even more selfies than usual this morning, kept taking them even when he'd already decided he wasn't going to post any of them.

He can’t stop taking pictures. And he can’t stop posting them. It’s his job, but it’s more than that. Without the photos, he would never look real. Without the likes and the comments, he would be nothing at all. He would feel like the thing, the strange spectre thing, he is in the mirror. 

Every time he’s woken up from the dreams, his eyes have been open.

“How about this one?” Taeyong is saying, and he’s standing over Yuta’s bed holding out a look: dark jeans and a low-cut white v-neck with a striped design on a chest pocket. “Do you want to wear this one first?” 

“Okay,” Yuta says, because it doesn’t really matter. He’ll wear all of the outfits eventually. It’s been 23 hours since his last photo (the desperate selfie from yesterday afternoon: a caption he never bothered checking; 6.9k likes, 68 comments) and they need to get going. He puts his phone down with difficulty and takes the outfit. Taeyong returns to his closet to finish packing the accessories he’s set out, and when he re-emerges, he gives Yuta an approving look for a moment and then hesitates with a fond smile.

“Your shirt’s on backwards,” Taeyong says, like he thinks it’s cute. “Didn’t you look in the mirror when you were done?” 

“No,” Yuta replies. After a moment he affects a laugh, trying to turn his expression into something like sheepish before pulling the shirt off. He’s glad to have it over his face, with the way the look feels so forced. “Silly me.” 

“Let’s hit the road,” Taeyong says, and struggles to gather up all the garment bags. Yuta comes over to help him, and he doesn’t know how to feel about the fact that Taeyong looks a little surprised. “Don’t forget your phone.” 

“Oh, right,” Yuta replies, shifting the garment bags around in his arms as he walks to the bed to get one hand free. When he has the phone back fitted snugly and weighty in his palm, he feels a little more complete. He opens the front facing camera, studies himself for a long time, and then follows Taeyong out to the car.

  
  
  


On Thursday, Yuta wakes up in someone's backyard.

He knows where this is. An influencer friend's party; August 2nd 2018, 8:55 PM; 8.3k likes, 81 comments; _Don't forget to have the time of your life ☆ #GardenParty #SummerNights_. 

There's the bright green grass, the white trellis covered with flowery vines and fairy lights, a sliver of the moon in the sky. There's the white gravel path lined with stones, part of a flowerbed in full bloom. 

But it's wrong. There's no blaring indie music, no sticky humidity clinging like a film to his skin, no mosquitoes buzzing around him. No crickets chirping, no quiet conversations, no stifling heat bringing sweat to his forehead. No smell of flowers and fruity drinks. Nothing with the slightest bit of depth, of sensation.

Funny, really. It wasn’t even a good party. He didn’t have fun. This shot was almost entirely manufactured.

The edges stop beyond the square, as they always do. Yuta expects nothing else by now. There's no awkwardly milling group of attendees not mingling at all, no streamers hanging between trees gone limp with the moisture in the air, no sporadically attached balloons, no hanging lanterns doing an extremely inadequate job of lighting the area. No refreshment table, sparse snacks on one side and too many cups of overly creative cocktails on the other. 

Funny, really. Those things were missing on purpose. The shot wasn’t composed so much for what it captured, but for what it didn’t. It’s almost a picture of a party he was never at. 

Yuta knows by now there's no point in trying to get out of the square, but he has to. He can't be stuck here at this lifeless party he used to construct this shot entirely on his own. He can't be stuck _anywhere_. But there's nowhere to go, like there never is. He struggles futilely against those boundaries again before he accepts he won't be able to touch them and surrenders. 

He backs up against the trellis, stands there feeling cornered by his own forced perspective, and waits.

  
  
  


Yuta spends far too much time for his liking in brand sponsor meetings. Any time at all, really, would be too much time. He doesn’t like them. If he’s honest, they’re boring. He goes and sits in some room and listens to a list of self-aggrandising attributes and a bunch of buzzwords, interspersed with a healthy dose of flattery (he’s just so _perfect_ for the brand and they _love his vibe_ because he’s _unique_ and _engaging_ and _builds genuine connections_ ). The meetings were a lot more interesting back when he was a micro-influencer, and people wanted to connect with him on a personal level rather than just claiming they did. But he hasn’t been a small fish for a long time, and the meetings just keep getting more boring. 

“So. Numbers,” the woman presenting to him says – he's forgotten her name, but he thinks it might be Angela. “We’re thinking 5 posts, at $10,000 each. Do we have you?” 

“Of course,” Yuta says, with that charming smile he’s so well-known for. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t been listening; he’d already decided he’d do this partnership if the numbers lined up, and they do. Today’s meeting is for a whole line of fitness and wellness products, and with the way he’s been dipping his toe into adding a bit more of a lifestyle component to his brand, maybe setting himself up for the vlog channel that's been nebulously taking shape in his head, it works out perfectly. He’s always thinking about his brand. “I’m looking forward to working with you.” 

They shake hands and get something signed and he leaves with a swag bag, because he always gets one of those whether he agrees to the deal or not. Even the rejected deals are hoping it’ll still end up in the background of a photo. It’s good – it’s perfect – until he starts thinking about five more photos. The idea of five more photos would’ve made him excited, before. Now, it feels like something pressing in on him. 

“Let’s get some pictures of you here. This is a really great location,” Taeyong says, looking at the side of the building once they walk out of it. It’s a brick wall, but an interesting shade of red that makes the texture pop. It’s a perfect backdrop. He probably would’ve suggested it anyway; it’s been 18 hours since his last photo (him in that dark jeans and v-neck outfit: caption he doesn't remember all of with the promo spiel and affiliate link; 7.9k likes, 74 comments. “You still need a photo with that watch for, um, what's the company ..." 

“Good eye,” Yuta compliments, and feels good about the fact that he can still make Taeyong smile. He remembers the ice cream parlour around the corner, and is pleased to find the stars aligning for one of the many photo ideas he’s got stored in a note on his phone. He’s always thinking of ideas. Everything he sees is a potential idea. Everything he sees, does, experiences, is content generation. “Can I buy you an ice cream?”

“I’d love that,” Taeyong says, and glows.

Yuta spends the whole drive back to his apartment curled up in the passenger seat editing the photo and listlessly switching between filters until he has the perfect shot of him with his tongue just barely pressed to the side of a strawberry ice cream, not enough to mess up the photogenic swirl, watch prominently displayed on the wrist of the hand holding the cone. It’s a little unhealthy, maybe, the way he begins obsessively refreshing from the millisecond after he posts. He ends up scrutinising the photo again, studying the edges of the frame, looking at what made it in. What’s inside that perfect square. What he might find himself in again. He works his way inwards, then looks at himself.

He looks light. Airy. Serendipitous. Joyful. Not a creature of layers. Not a creature that looked at himself this morning in the mirror and found another one of those layers gone.

No one knows what happens behind the photos.

  
  
  


On Friday, Yuta wakes up in an alley. 

He knows where this is. Paris; June 7th, 2018, 2:58 PM; 9.1k likes, 86 comments; _When in Paris ... #Paris #France #fashion #city #sponsored_.

There's a rough old brick wall, uneven cobblestones, a lantern protruding from between the first two storys of the building. There's a sliver of a stately old white-facaded apartment building and a spire rising up from another building in the distance. There's just the slightest splash of sunlight casting a well-placed shadow down the length of the path. 

But it’s wrong. There's no lingering smell of cigarette smoke from the group that just passed through, no buzz of city noise in the air, no summer heat. No calls of birds overhead, no laughter from the group of girls walking down the adjoining street. 

Funny, really. It was supposed to serve as a small square of backdrop. The clothes he was modelling were the only thing in the shot that really mattered. As long as it provided a good background, he could’ve been absolutely anywhere. 

The edges don't frighten him as much this time. There's only one thing that's missing: there's no Taeyong in front of him, smiling at Yuta from behind his camera and telling him _très beau._

Funny, really. He didn't notice Taeyong's smile much at the time, but he kept thinking about it later after all the photos had been taken. 

Yuta doesn’t even give the edges of the square another glance this time. He doesn’t bother thinking this will be the time anything budges.

He sits down on the bumpy uneven cobblestones and runs his fingertip along the spaces between them and doesn't feel any roughness.

  
  
  


Yuta used to think he didn’t spend enough time at parties, with the way he would’ve spent all his time at parties if he could’ve, but today he'd decided within a minute of walking into this one that he’d already been there long enough. 

Taeyong’s here with him, and Yuta’s practically clinging to him. It’s kind of uncharacteristic. Usually, influencer parties are where he’s in his element; he schmoozes and talks and jokes and laughs and networks and gains followers on the rare occasion someone there isn’t following him yet, but today it isn’t right. Today he doesn’t feel like part of the party. He doesn’t feel _here_. Even with so many people around, the crowds of bodies and the enthusiastic chatter and laughter surrounding him on all sides, he feels isolated. He feels like Robinson Crusoe, on an island of abnormality amidst a sea of ordinary.

His eyes were open when he woke up from the alley, on his balcony in front of his succulent plants. He checked the mirror and, like every day, there was less of him. 

“Here,” Taeyong says, and he’s pressing a glass into Yuta’s hand. Yuta doesn’t know what it is, but he drinks it anyway. He hasn’t taken a Xanax in a few days with the way he’s getting a little more used to fading, so he doesn’t need to be careful with the amount he drinks. He briefly considers getting absolutely wasted. “Do you want something to eat?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Yuta says, and he doesn’t mean to sound robotic, but he does. It’s overwhelming, the amount of people here and how loud they are and how loud the music is and how even the dim lighting feels too harsh. It’s grating, the way everyone seems happy and the air is crackling with energy and everything is so in the moment. Yuta can’t get into the moment at all. 

“Are you sure?” Taeyong’s voice is soft and concerned, and so is the gentle hand he puts on Yuta's arm. “You’ve barely eaten today.” 

“Can you get some photos of me?” Yuta asks. “It’s been 28 hours since I posted anything –” (him with the ice cream and the watch: a few emojis and an affiliate link; 7.6k likes, 72 comments) “– so I need to get something up as soon as I get home.” 

"I can," Taeyong replies, after a moment. His voice doesn't change.

Yuta stays up all night on Instagram, but for once, he’s not checking the likes and comments on his new photo. He’s aimlessly scrolling up and down his own profile, feeling a weird restlessness and manic energy that’s making him think strange and risky thoughts. He takes a break to scroll his feed for a while, and normally he’d be tapping like on every photo, but today he can’t do it. The vacations, the cars, the rainy afternoons curled up with a book, the mornings spent in the gym, the clothes, the friends laughing together, none of it. Seulgi cut her hair short, and she looks so pretty, but he can’t make himself double tap that photo either. It feels weird. He doesn’t know what’s happening behind any of these people’s photos, either. He doesn’t know how often they’re in them. 

Last night he stayed up all night too (he woke up from the alley with his eyes open and he knew he had to have been asleep even though every atom in his body felt certain he hadn't) and drove himself crazy frantically Googling the things happening to him. The fading. The photo dreams. The strange awakenings. He needed to see if anyone had an explanation. Or if maybe someone, _anyone_ , is like him. To see if he’s not alone. 

He couldn’t find anything.

The mirror doesn’t terrify him anymore, not like it used to. He’s gotten used to it, fading. Maybe a little too used to it.

Yuta scrolls his feed and wonders if he’s the only person this is happening to. If maybe there are others, but like him, they just don’t talk about it.

He ends up back on his own profile, because he always does. The weird restless manic energy suddenly makes him think about deleting those photos. The beach in Bali, the nightclub dance floor, the rooftop brunch restaurant, the backyard garden party, the alley in Paris. 46.2k likes, 454 comments. He wonders if, somehow, he could get back some layers of himself.

  
  
  


On Saturday, Yuta wakes up in an amusement park. 

He knows where this is. Kingdom of Adventure; May 17th 2019, 1:43 PM; 10.2k likes, 99 comments; _It's always a good day for a thrill ☀ #kingdomofadventure #amusementpark #sunnydayfun_. 

There's a big roller coaster behind him, bordered on either side in the distance by a spinning ride and the red and yellow striped big top of a circus tent. There's a chain link fence directly at his back, separating him from the forming queue of parkgoers. The sky is blue and cloudless, and the sun is at its zenith. 

But it's wrong. There's no movement of the roller coaster, clacking and clattering of the rides, no screaming of the riders, no nearly indistinguishable announcements blaring from loudspeakers. No carnival music coming from the game booths, no smell of funnel cakes or popcorn from the food stands, no calls of the birds that patrol the areas near the stands waiting for someone to drop something for them to eat. Nothing is moving, nothing is breathing and nothing has even the smallest spark of life. 

Funny, really. He found all that a bit grating and wished it would just stop for a moment. 

The edges of the frame and the darkness beyond them keep everything clean. There's no litter on the ground, no packs of children roaming wild and messy, no dancing clowns. There's nothing ugly, dirty or alarming. 

Funny, really. He hated all that. It wasn't photogenic and so he wished it would disappear.

Yuta doesn't even look at the edges. He doesn't even think about them. There's no point. He turns around and leans over the fence behind him and watches the frozen roller coaster hang suspended just before the top of the hill.

  
  
  


Yuta goes out every day, despite the time and energy it takes, because his job is to live his life. Or a staged, amped up, exciting version of it. To live _something_. But today, he doesn't go out. He doesn't call Taeyong. He doesn't get his makeup done. He doesn't get out of bed. He stayed up all night again (he wasn't asleep, those things aren't dreams, he knows that now) and he's exhausted. He's always up all night these days. He stares at the ceiling until it's been eighteen hours since his last photo (him in his suit at the party with a half-empty champagne glass in hand and a fake smile on: a caption he doesn't remember; a number of likes and comments he doesn't remember even though he's checked them nearly a hundred times since then), and then he aimlessly snaps one of his window and posts it exactly how it is. Afternoon sun through a gauzy curtain in a dim room. Unedited and unfiltered. No caption. No hashtags. He just needs to post _something_. It's a perfect shot for the new moodboard he has leaning up against the side of his desk: _For When You Feel Nothing_.

For when you feel _like_ nothing. 

He stays on Instagram after he posts, because he's always on Instagram. He scrolls his feed. He checks some hashtags. And, like always, he ends up on his own profile. He goes through every single picture one by one, looking at them with complete scrutiny, with total focus on what's in the frame. 

He worked so hard on all of these. He works so hard on all of _this_ , his life. His life, made up of photos. He works so hard at Instagram. It feels like he puts his soul into it.

Yuta's spent too much time awake, too much time thinking, too much time on Instagram. Finally, he gets out of bed and trudges to the bathroom. 

He looks in the mirror and is barely there. There can't be many layers left. He wonders how long it will be until there's nothing at all, until he's no longer _there_. And if, when there's nothing at all, he'll still be _here_. He wonders where those last layers will be. He has a feeling he knows.


End file.
